On July 18th, Rusbridger received a call from Oliver Robbins, the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, alerting him that agents would be coming to the Guardian’s offices to seize the hard drives containing the Snowden files. Rusbridger again explained that the files were also on encrypted computers outside England, but his reasoning did not sway Robbins. Rusbridger asked if, instead, his staff members could destroy the files themselves, and Robbins consented. That Saturday, Rusbridger told associates to take the five laptops from the bunker to the basement and to smash the hard drives and circuit boards in front of two agents from the G.C.H.Q.Regarding the First Amendment,
Even if the Guardian was censored, [Rusbridger] was confident that the Times would be free to publish. Abramson was less certain. “I did worry about that,” she told me. She felt that the Obama Administration was trying aggressively to criminalize leaks. In early August, the Times was working on a story about an intercepted terror threat when James R. Clapper, the Administration’s director of intelligence, asked the paper’s Washington bureau to withhold certain details. Clapper warned that, if the full version were made public, the Times “would have blood on our hands,” Abramson recalls. The paper complied with the request. But, to emphasize that the government could not expect the Times to withhold information that is in the public interest, she travelled to Washington to meet with Clapper. During the meeting, he urged her not to publish the Snowden material. “The First Amendment is first for a reason,” she told him. (A spokesman for Clapper disputed this account.)Clapper, it should be noted, has perjured himself before the Senate without even a veneer of remorse.
This spirit of The Guardian, personified in its Editor, is the spirit required for a free press to be anything more than a mouthpiece for the powerful. The paper endorses no party or organization out of course. While liberal, it is liberal in the original sense - free and discursively open. This is partly accounted for by its relative independence from financial pressures - "The Guardian doesn’t need to be profitable, so long as its losses are reduced and the trust can continue to subsidize them with its other businesses." - but its financial losses must be reduced, at some point, in order for its voice to remain heard.
Journalists frame public conversations and debates, ideally serving as moderators between the public and the powerful. Such debates are the foundation for change, their absence the basis for inertia. In this case, the inertia regards the continued erosion of the role being described (or, to put it in Constitutional terms, the First and Fourth Amendments). But who can be counted upon to host such debates when the powerful don't want to have them? Editors and journalists with more fortitude that we might regularly be able to ask of our scribes.
